Scottish Widower Tries ‘Message in a Bottle’ to Search for Love, Gets Blowback for Littering

After his wife died of cancer, a Scottish man named Craig
Sullivan took to searching for a new soulmate by casting 2,000
message-filled bottles into various waterways around the UK, a
desperately romantic act inspired by The Police song “Message
in a Bottle.” Unfortunately for Sullivan, his SOS to the world
has been viewed as an unsightly heap of trash by his fellow
beachgoers, who asked him to stop.

According to theTelegraph, visitors to Britain’s Rhossili Bay, where
Sullivan did some of his casting, were concerned the bottles
were harming the wildlife and further polluting the waterways.
One such critic was Helen Gill, who told the paper:

“I went for a beach walk and we came across about 30 glass
bottles with lids. They had lots of messages inside about
finding love. It’s may be romantic, but what is it doing to
the environment?”

Far from being a potential soulmate, Gill actually penned her
own message to Sullivan asking him to knock it off, writing:

“Those bottles could be smashed before they land on our
precious beach or stepped on.

“I would ask you to think of another more environmentally
friendly way of carrying on with your campaign. When visiting
our beaches you should leave only footprints.”

Sullivan wrote in a Medium post that
while the specifics of his plan were inspired by The Police,
the idea more generally came to him after reading Amy Krause
Rosenthal’s heartbreaking New York Timesessay, “You May Want to
Marry My Husband.”

“I wondered what my own wife might have written, before the big
C took her away from our family nearly 18 months ago,” Sullivan
wrote.

Sullivan stopped casting the bottles on orders from the
Scottish Environment Protection Agency after releasing about
200 of the bottles into a river. He told the BBC that it was
never his goal to cause any trouble, but rather “to send a wee
love bottle with a message to someone I had not yet met.”

Before you feel too bad for Sullivan, though, know that 50
women have already lined up to meet him. Get it, Craig.